It’s funny. Their “Advertise” page explicitly mentions UK on demographics section (7% of users). Both Advertise and Rules pages explicitly mention local along with US laws. It looks like they actually do business in UK serving ads to UK users and thus should be subject to local laws themselves.
If they want their assets, they will have to use U.S courts to get them and U.S courts will refuse to enforce British law that violates the first amendment. It's pretty simple actually. If they had assets in Britain, then they could get to them, but they don't.
They can just treat 4chan as malware server or a drug cartel. There exist sanction mechanisms against foreign entities that do not use local law enforcement in which case opinion of US courts will be irrelevant.
>4chan is showing ads on their site, but if your idea had any grounds, the issue would be with the ad network, not 4chan.
It's hard to understand the logic of this statement. Why the ad network? 4chan business is to show ads to users while offering them a platform for conversations. What 3rd party service do they use is irrelevant unless that is by coincidence an UK company.
>More realistically, 4chan will likely be banned by UK ISPs after a court ruling.
Serving ads to UK users does not grant the UK enforcement jurisdiction over 4chan. They have no presence, assets, or agents in the UK. If the UK still attempts to issue a judgement contrary to the first amendment, the constitution in general, and/or US law, it will not be recognized by US courts.
Nobody in the world cares about US constitution or opinion of US courts. It is absolutely irrelevant. If American company does business somewhere and breaks local laws, that part of their business can be disrupted or shut down (by blocking traffic, restricting financial transactions to certain entities, blocking shipments), executives may be arrested on arrival, there may be secondary sanctions etc.
This is absolutely common practice happening everywhere. There is a firewall in every country. Think of malware servers that America blocks.
As if any government would ever take any advice from HN... :)
No, seriously, what's your point? That for a G7 government interfering with interests of American companies outside of US jurisdiction it is somehow a problem?
Yes, it is 'somehow a problem'. Just like the reverse is 'somehow a problem'. Effectively advising a large audience that they can ignore the law whereas there are plenty of examples of why you probably shouldn't be ignoring the law is a pretty silly thing to do.
You know that first amendment of the thing you say nobody cares about. A fundamental human right people are giving up in the UK so they can be “protected” from big bad ol 4chan. What a joke…
Last time I checked USA is not the most democratic country in the world (#28 in democracy index below Uruguay, Czechia and Malta), so it is certainly not the role model for freedom. Yes, surprise, there exist other views in the world on how to find the balance between many different fundamental human rights and it does not mean those views reject freedom of speech. They just restrict it differently than America (which has several categories of unprotected speech and ranks lower in press freedom indices than some other countries which may restrict more categories).
It's bad optics to build their own Hadrian's Firewall, so they are trying to bully foreign companies into compliance instead. If they want to go after the ad revenue, they would have to try to identify and prosecute the UK-based companies doing business with 4chan, and they will struggle to do that when they have no ability to subpoena 4chan for their business records.
Such firewall exists everywhere, because courts can block access to various websites on different grounds (malware, copyright infringement etc) everywhere.
